Marcel Prawy

Cover of book Marcel Prawy: Glück das mir verblieb, ISBN 3-85498-174-0

Marcel Prawy (birth name: Marcel Horace Frydmann, Ritter[1] von Prawy) (born 29 December 1911, in Vienna – died 23 February 2003, in Vienna) was an Austrian dramaturg, opera connoisseur and opera critic. He was born into a Jewish Austro-Hungarian noble family and studied law, but his life belonged to the opera. He became secretary of the tenor Jan Kiepura and, together, emigrated to the USA when persecution of the Austrian Jews became unbearable in the late 1930s.

With the help of his confidante Mártha Eggerth, he became acquainted with American musicals and music in general. After the end of the Second World War, Prawy returned to Vienna and brought with him the musical Kiss Me, Kate. It was received by the Viennese with great reservation as they feared the arrival of the American-style musical would spell the end of the traditional Viennese operetta. Nonetheless, Prawy succeeded and was considered henceforth as the one who made German language musicals acceptable and popular.

His work in opera

From 1955 on Prawy served as dramaturg at the Vienna Volksoper and from 1972 as chief-dramaturg at the Vienna State Opera. Between 1976 and 1982 Prawy was a professor at the Viennese College of Music (Wiener Musikhochschule, today Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien) and lecturer in the field of theatre science at the University of Vienna. He also gave lectures as guest professor at numerous American and Japanese universities.

He became widely known and highly regarded because of a television and radio broadcast series produced by the ORF, where he introduced his viewers and listeners to the world of opera and operetta with outstanding knowledge of the subject matter and marvelous humor.

Prawy maintained close friendships with many prominent singers, composers and musicians, such as Leonard Bernstein and Robert Stolz. He was awarded numerous awards and honours by the nation and internationally, including becoming honorary citizen of Vienna and Miami. Hardly anyone succeeded in picturing opera for his audience as impressively as he did, and thus Prawy became an institution of the Viennese opera as the National Guide to Opera (Opernführer der Nation).

In his final years, Prawy was quite frank about his unique, and rather eccentric, method of archiving his enormous collection of theatre programmes, recordings, letters, photographs, personal notes, and similar loose sheets gathered over many decades. Although Prawy had rooms at the Hotel Sacher, he invited journalists into the private apartment he was still keeping. It contained thousands of plastic shopping bags, each of which was carefully labelled so that he could in no time access any information he needed.

On his 90th birthday in 2001, a special celebration was held for him in the Vienna State Opera. Prawy's death in 2003 of a lung embolism was regarded as the passing of one of the last witnesses of an old time gone by and greatly mourned by the public.

Publications

References

Much of the content of this article comes from the equivalent German-language Wikipedia article.

Notes

  1. ↑ Regarding personal names: Ritter is a title, translated approximately as Sir (denoting a Knight), not a first or middle name. There is no equivalent female form.

Sources

External links

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